INTERVIEW WITH TED ESTRADA
BY ED GROSSMAN AUGUST 7, 2001
MR. GROSSMAN: Today I have Ted Estrada here. He is a former Skipper, and an
original Skipper for the Fish and Wildlife Service of the motor vessel Curlew. We are at
the USFWS Juneau Field Office. The date is the 7th of August 2001. The Field Office is
in Juneau, Alaska at Vintage Park. This is Ed Grossman conducting the interview.
I guess for the benefit of the audience, I’d like to get a little information on your
background, first of all your personal background. Can you tell where you were born and
what date that was?
MR. ESTRADA: I was born in a leap year; February 29, 1936 in Wrangell, Alaska.
MR. GROSSMAN: So how old would that make you now?
MR. ESTRADA: I’ve had sixteen birthdays. I am the same age as my granddaughter.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you are just old enough to drive now!
MR. ESTRADA: Just old enough to drive, depending on what state you are in.
MR. GROSSMAN: You’ll be eligible for the next war if we have one.
MR. ESTRADA: I guess, I’m not keen on that!
MR. GROSSMAN: And your parent’s names?
MR. ESTRADA: My dad was a full-blooded Spaniard. His full name was Guillermo
Estrada. Guillermo translated to William and he was called Bill. He comes from
Colorado. He came up to Alaska when he was fourteen years old. He had been to Russia
and back. My mother was from Washington State. She was born on Camano Island. She
was Shamus Indian and a bunch of other stuff. She came to Alaska when she was seven
years old. He name was Alethea.
MR. GROSSMAN: So at seven years old, did she come up with her parents?
MR. ESTRADA: She came with her parents, but her parents divorced. She had five
children. My oldest sister Mehangalia, the next sister was Willow, myself, my brother
Phil. His Spanish name is Philverno. Then I have a younger sister Molly. Believe it or
not, today, we are all over sixty and all still alive.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s fabulous. Your father, he had a different means of getting to
Alaska as I recall.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. He stowed away on different steamers coming up. He ended up
where he didn’t want to end up, in Prince William Sound. He was trying to go to
Ketchikan. So he worked at the Kendicott Mine up at Cordova. He stowed away to
come back down southeast and he ended up in Seattle and in San Francisco. Then he
hopped rail cars to go back and forth to wherever he wanted to go.
MR. GROSSMAN: When they were up here together, what was it that they were doing?
MR. ESTRADA: Dad was a fisherman. He trawled commercially. He could tell you
stories about being out on Forrester Island in a small boat, rowing, and trawling with
cotton line. He would catch King Salmon and sell them for ten cents apiece. That’s
probably before I was born.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s ten cents apiece as apposed to the pound.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and he had to deliver twice a day.
MR. GROSSMAN: My goodness!
MR. ESTRADA: But he liked to get out. He did a lot of hunting. We lived, not in
towns for most of our early lives. I remember being in Port Alexander when they were
fishing down there. I remember being in Wrangell very little. I was pretty young.
Somewhere in the middle forties we moved up to Elfin Cove. We lived there just in the
summers. We spent some winters there.
MR. GROSSMAN: Elfin Cove is on the north end of Chichagof Island.
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, and in fact if you look at the treasure maps of Alaska you’ll find
that the Estrada family lived at Bingham Cove.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s on the north end of Yakobi Island.
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, and that was in the 1950’s that we lived out there.
MR. GROSSMAN: If I remember from those accounts, I guess your Dad was doing
fishing and then your mother had a laundry business, is that right?
MR. ESTRADA: We were the only family that ever lived there. It was an island right in
the middle of the bay. My mother did laundry. We had two big tents. There was a
drying tent, and we lived in a tent. The washing machine had a Briggs and Stratton to run
the machines. We had to haul water across the bay in a skiff because there was no water
on the island. There we no animals either. Bingham Cove is known for the bear and stuff
that are out there.
MR. GROSSMAN: So being on the island you avoided some of the troubles with the
bear?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and it was neat place to be raised. Everything was outside. And
you had fish. If I remember right, we had game all year long.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you were born here in Juneau?
MR. ESTRADA: I was born in Wrangell.
MR. GROSSMAN: But the other siblings?
MR. ESTRADA: Let’s see…my older sister was born in Wrangell, Willow was born in
Juneau, my brother and I were born in Wrangell and believe it or not, my youngest sister
was born at Cass Bay on the west coast of Chicahagof Island on the boat. She was
registered born at Kimshan Cove, which was a mining community at that time. And
there was a Post Office there. That was in 1939.
MR. GROSSMAN: And all of that is gone now?
MR. ESTRADA: It’s just in ruins now. My grandmother was a person that helps with
the birthing. Not a birthing mother, but whatever you call the person that helps.
MR. GROSSMAN: So then, as you got older you worked your way into the fishing
business did you?
MR. ESTRADA: Before I was old enough to supposedly run machinery, I had fished
with Dad before that; but I went to work for a man called Ernie Swanson who was the
founder or Elfin Cove, on his fish packing boat. It was fifty footer. We used to buy fish
out in the northwestern part of Yacovia Island and Deer Harbor, Elfin Cove and Bingham
Cove. We’d haul our fish to Juneau, which was 110 miles away. We’d buy fish for about
three or four days and then run to Juneau; deliver the fish, pick up groceries and come
back. We’d offload the groceries in the store out at Elfin Cove and then we’d hit the
fishing grounds again. I kind of was like a baseball team. I was traded. Gil Bixby and
Peterson bought the outfit; the boat. I stayed with it. Then Bixby bought out Peterson, I
stayed with the boat until 1959. But all of that time I was involved in buying fish.
That’s where I learned to run boats. Gil Bixby was my mentor at that time. He pretty
much gave me the boat to run.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you, by delivering the fish, got a percentage then?
MR. ESTRADA: Depending on the size of fish or brand there was three to five cents a
pound broker fee, I guess you’d call it. That was between the fisherman and the delivery.
That way, the only other cold storage was at Pelican at that time I think. Later in years it
was at Pelican, but I remember Ernie ran all of his fish to Juneau because he had to buy
groceries and supplies for his store. That’s why he ran to Juneau.
MR. GROSSMAN: Which in turn was bought by the fishermen that you were buying
from.
MR. ESTRADA: He had a general store out there. To me, when I was young, it was big.
But at six years old in Elfin Cove, I made $49.50 that summer. A friend of mine, Walt
Larson who used to live there, we used to run the hand trucks up and down the dock and
from the boat into the warehouse. Once or twice a week we’d do that. The reason I
didn’t make $50.00 that summer was because I had wood to cut or water to pack or
something. But I didn’t do my chores and Dad wouldn’t let me go and run the hand
trucks to haul wood. That’s why I remember it was $49.50 for the summer. I was six
years old.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you spent most of your early years around west Chichagof,
Yacobi, Elfin Cove and Pelican?
MR. ESTRADA: Up until 1959, which would have made me twenty-four years old, or
something like that.
MR. GROSSMAN: And 1959 kind of rings a bell; that was the year of Statehood wasn’t
it?
MR. ESTRADA: It was the year of Statehood. It was the year that I got Polio.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh.
MR. ESTRADA: I was pretty much paralyzed but I overcame that in a couple of years.
But I had to get off of the water. My first year, 1960, after Statehood, I started working
for Fish and Game. I was able to run one of their little thirty-two foot research boats out
counting seine boats and the amount of gear that was out; observing the biologists
counting the amount of fish. Some people were walking the streams then, but I couldn’t
really get out and do that kind of work. That’s when I started running boats for State
Fish and Game.
MR. GROSSMAN: Because of your recovering from Polio you were better able to run
the vessel than do the ship to shore duties?
MR. ESTRADA: I couldn’t walk well. I still today can’t walk well on a beach. That’s
when my legs kind of went out from under me. I still have that problem. But a rocking
boat don’t bother me a bit, as long as I’ve got something to hang on to.
MR. GROSSMAN: Do you have any particular hobbies? Was there anything that really
caught your interest on the side, besides running boats?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t remember having any particular hobbies. Today of course, I
like growing flower believe it or not. It seems a big change.
MR. GROSSMAN: I’ve seen some of your pictures. You are very talented, and have a
green thumb for sure.
MR. ESTRADA: I like to fish. But if I’m not going to catch any, I don’t like to fish. I
can’t see sitting out in a boat for hours and hours, just drowning herring. I loose interest
real fast. I am not a fresh water-fishing enthusiast whatsoever.
MR. GROSSMAN: Just salt water. So how about, was there any particular events that
you felt influenced your life the most?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t know. I remember the first time that Ernie Swanson let me run
the Elfin 2 that was the name of his boat. I felt powerful. The boat was big, I was small
and I had control of it. It made me feel good. “Everybody, look at me, I am running the
boat”! And I was young then.
MR. GROSSMAN: So that pretty much helped you decide that’s what you wanted to
do as a career?
MR. ESTRADA: I had a hard time at school with literature and math. I graduated from
High School, but that wasn’t interesting; to go on and be an executive somewhere. I just
wanted to go, and be on the water. I liked it.
MR. GROSSMAN: How many boats would you say that you’ve either owned or run in
your career?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, there was Dad’s fishing boat, the Elfin 2, the Elfin 3, then I went
on to Fish and Game. I had several of their little small boats that I ran. Then I went to a
Patrol boat for Fish and Game in 1962. It was a forty-four foot boat called the Skipjack.
It was under law enforcement and the State Troopers. Fish and Game owned the
Protection Division, that’s what it was called then. I don’t remember when it transferred
over to the State Troopers.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was called Fish and Wildlife Protection, right?
MR. ESTRADA: Then it was just Fish and Game Protection at that time. I was
assigned to the Sitka District, which took it’s bearing off of Chichagof on the west side of
Admiralty Island. That’s where I was assigned. Then they decided that I was getting
good enough so they transferred me to Seldovia to a bigger boat. I had passed my test for
a Boat Officer. They graduated me and transferred me to Seldovia. I didn’t like Seldovia
so I quit.
MR. GROSSMAN: Where is Seldovia at?
MR. ESTRADA: Across from Homer.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s the Cook Inlet area isn’t it?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. I am trying to think of the name of the guy who was the Vessel
Supervisor at that time. The Skipper that was up there in Kodiak didn’t want to be in
Kodiak, I didn’t want to be in Seldovia but he wouldn’t let us swap. We both wanted to
swap. So we ended up both quitting. That’s where George Putney comes into the
picture.
MR. GROSSMAN: I see, and how does he come into the picture?
MR. ESTRADA: He picked up the boat that I wanted to run out of Kodiak, and he was
running it. But he ran a similar boat before that.
MR. GROSSMAN: And what kind was that?
MR. ESTRADA: Power scows; eighty-three or eighty-eight foot power scows.
MR. GROSSMAN: So when you quit, did you move back to southeast Alaska?
MR. ESTRADA: I moved back to Juneau and went to work at Northern Commercial
Company. I was working for them for about a year. That’s when the University of
Alaska came in with the Marine Science Center, which was in Douglas. I got onboard
their boat as an Assistant Engineer. That was in 1964.
MR. GROSSMAN: What was the name of that boat?
MR. ESTRADA: It was the Acona. It was a ninety-five foot, 300 ton. That was the
only job open was the Assistant Engineer on there. Within a year I was on as First Mate.
I stayed with them until they moved the Marine Science Center up to Seward. I became
Skipper sometime in there. When they moved up to Seward they had another boat in
Juneau called the Ursa Minor, which again was an eighty-eight foot power scow. Wait a
minute, wrong length. It was eighty-three feet and 188 ton. I ran that for two years and
they decided to get rid of it. That was about the time that Fish and Wildlife Service got
the Curlew. So I just moved over.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you weren’t with the Fish and Wildlife Service prior to the
purchase or transfer of the Curlew?
MR. ESTRADA: I was.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, you were?
MR. ESTRADA: I was the transfer.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I see, it was boat and Skipper?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, boat and Skipper.
MR. GROSSMAN: You mentioned that you finished High School. Where did you go to
High School?
MR. ESTRADA: The first year of grade school was in Juneau. We lived on the boat in
the boat harbor. Then I think the next year we moved to the house across the bridge.
There was a white house down there where the new bridge is now. The house is gone.
Then from the second year, I went through grade school in Douglas. The first year of
High School was in Douglas. And then for some unknown reason, I think I know the
reason, I decided to leave home. So I went to Shelton Jackson in Sitka, which was a
Presbyterian boarding school. I finished my High School there. I just needed…I was
smarted than my Dad. At fourteen years old I needed to get out on my own.
MR. GROSSMAN: Isn’t that the case with all fourteen year olds?
MR. ESTRADA: That’s right. [Both laughing] That cost me five hundred dollars a year
at school. And we had to work ten hours a week at the school, at Shelton Jackson.
MR. GROSSMAN: Where you helping with maintenance and that sort of thing?
MR. ESTRADA: We worked in the kitchen, the laundry; we worked in the Boiler room,
helped with construction. I enjoyed taking a class that was in the Machine Shop. They
had a boat building shop where they’d build boats. They had a wood shop. They had a
sawmill. We used to go out and bring our own logs in and rig up the sawmill and cut our
own lumber to build own buildings. That was an education in itself, at the sawmill.
Learning how to use; we got to use all of the saws, the gain saws and all of that.
MR. GROSSMAN: So it sounds like all of the hands on programs there is what really
equipped you for your work.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. You got to do a lot of things. The old boilers burn crude oil,
you know. We used to start them with catalogs to get the fire started. I’ve seen them
shut them down at night and get up a four o’clock in the morning and have to fire them off
again so there was hot water and heat in the buildings.
MR. GROSSMAN: I imagine that took quite a bit of maintenance too.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and as young kids working in the laundry, if you had somebody
you wanted to tease you’d starch his shorts for him! There was a lot of tomfoolery. The
kitchen was another neat place. You learned how to cook. We had a Dietician. We
usually worked six weeks at one spot. The first week in the kitchen you worked peeling
potatoes. That was your job. Later, you got to move on to the stove and cook. That
was more good training. Shelton Jackson had an excellent school as far as hands on. I
learned a lot of stuff from in there.
MR. GROSSMAN: Great! Ted, were you ever in the military services at all?
MR. ESTRADA: Never. I made the mistake of getting married. That relieved me of
being in the service. There was a kid involved. So I think I was classified as 2-F or
something like that. I think it was 1957. Then I got polio in 1959 so that put me at 4-F
so I never was in the military.
MR. GROSSMAN: Would that have been the Korean Conflict?
MR. ESTRADA: The end of the Korean Conflict. I did graduate from High School in
1955.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was out of Sitka?
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, out of Sitka at Shelton Jackson.
MR. GROSSMAN: How did you meet your current spouse?
MR. ESTRADA: My current, or which one? I think I’ve been married four times. The
first time was six months. The second time was a childhood girlfriend. I met her when
she was thirteen. We have our kids, and she died at the age of 36 with a ruptured barrier
aneurysm, so I finished raising the three kids. Then I did a rebound marriage that lasted
three months. Then I married my present wife, Juanita. We’ve been married for 23 years
now and are still going strong.
MR. GROSSMAN: How did your career with the FWS affect your family?
MR. ESTRADA: It prospered! We had a paycheck coming home. I started out in the
FWS in the fall of 1972. I started out at $7.36 an hour. That’s all they’re making down
in Tennessee right now! For anybody that’s been working for a while. Minimum wage is
five something isn’t it?
MR. GROSSMAN: Umhum. So how did you meet Juanita?
MR. ESTRADA: Through a mutual friend. They introduced us.
MR. GROSSMAN: What year did you guys marry?
MR. ESTRADA: In 1978.
MR. GROSSMAN: Did you and Juanita have any children?
MR. ESTRADA: No. Juanita has three children, that’s Michael, Anita and Chris.
Michael still lives in Juneau, Anita lives in Lawrenceville, GA and Chris is in Boca Raton,
FL. My daughter Tina lives here. Rocky lives out at Angoon. And Yvonne is down in
Mount Vernon, Washington.
MR. GROSSMAN: They are sort of scattered about.
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t know how many grandkids I’ve got. I think there’s twelve
grandkids, and I have five great-grandkids.
MR. GROSSMAN: Wow! So back to your career with the Service Ted. Why did you
want to work for FWS at the time?
MR. ESTRADA: It became a coincidence more that anything because they were moving
the Marine Science Center of the University of Alaska to Seward. My family was
established here with a house and everything. That was in 1972. I knew Fred Robards
and Sid Morgan. I tried to get on the Surf Bird when they had it. It was between…
Johnson was quitting.
MR. GROSSMAN: Johnson was…
MR. ESTRADA: Johnson was the original Skipper on the Surf Bird. Then they were
looking because he retired.
MR. GROSSMAN: What was his first name Ted?
MR. ESTRADA: I can’t remember.
MR. GROSSMAN: OK, Mr. Johnson. That doesn’t matter.
MR. ESTRADA: There was a Fred Halstead, but he wasn’t on that boat. They were
looking for a Skipper for the Surf Bird and I put an application in. Fred Robards wanted
a tree climber, so they hired a tree climber instead of a boat Skipper. Fred kind of ran the
boat. But anyway, as that went on, I was working at Northern Commercial at the time,
no I wasn’t. I was still at the University. That was during the transfer period. I had
took the boat up to Valdez and I was just kind of working back and forth. Then Fred
Robards called and asked me if I wanted to Skipper the boat. They were getting another
boat similar to the Surf Bird. But it was up in Kodiak. With everything happening right
then I said, “Yes”. I didn’t even ask “How much?” That’s how I got hired with the FWS
at the time. That was in November of 1972. Wayne Nyugen [Spelling?] was the Field
Supervisor for southeast Alaska. He was based in Juneau. Marlene Sorello was the
Secretary. She was an old friend. She was born as Marlene Palmer. I have known her
since I was a kid. She was the Secretary. When I walked into the office, Don
Montgomery was basically my… he was the Chief Biologist, right under Wayne. Bruce
Konnet was there. Ron Byrd was there. I was the next person. I remember Wayne’s
instructions to me. He said, “When you’re out doing some stuff and someone asks ‘what
are they going to say?’ You’d better answer because you are part of ‘they’”.
MR. GROSSMAN: So your first position then, from the very start was… what did they
call that position?
MR. ESTRADA: The name there, you really had a big title. You were Master Engineer.
You were the Skipper and the Master. I guess I got too high powered for somebody
because now they are called Ship Operators.
MR. GROSSMAN: At least it gives you a clue that it’s a boat. So basically, your job
was to take this boat and maintain it.
MR. ESTRADA: And get it ready. You want to go back to the beginning of the boat, of
what I’d seen before we got into it?
MR. GROSSMAN: Absolutely.
MR. ESTRADA: The Curlew was an Army P-Boat, the P446. They were built in 1953.
They were built for the Korean War. Their design was a harbor tug, cargo and passengers.
I don’t know where they were built or how many.
MR. GROSSMAN: But they were built in California right?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, somewhere in California.
MR. GROSSMAN: San Diego, I think is it.
MR. ESTRADA: Some were built there. And some were built back up on the
Mississippi River I think somewhere. St. Louis or something like that. Anyway the
Bureau of Mines had this boat and I think they got it out of the Cosmolean. [?] Because
it was still when the Bureau of Mines got it. They wanted to do seismic work out in San
Francisco Bay. But the boats configuration was that it had a cargo hold. And forward of
the cargo hold was the crew’s quarters. This was four beds, oil stove, shower and toilet.
I don’t remember the exact configuration of it. Then, there was the cargo hold. They you
moved back to the engineering area on the top deck. There was the wheelhouse. At the
very back was where the bus seats were. It was designed for twenty-one seats for
moving people. That was the original configuration. The Bureau of Mines took the cargo
hold and cut a hatchway between the crew’s quarters and the cargo hold. I guess
originally you had to go outside from wheelhouse to go down to the crew’s quarters and
crawl down through a companionway. So they cut a hatchway through between the two
and they put chain-hung bunks to sleep on in the cargo hold. In there they kind of
extended the galley into there; there was a refrigerator and freezer and stuff. And they cut
another companionway at the other end of the crew’s quarters to go up into the
wheelhouse. That’s where those steps are in there today. The Bureau of Mines did that.
They did a lot of modifications. They took all of the bus seats out and put a great big
worktable in the back. They took the original fourteen or sixteen-inch portholes out and
put plastic ones in, so they cut holes in it so they could run their seismic gear out the
back window without having to hang it out an open window. But their problem with it
was that it was an unstable platform. Everybody was getting seasick. Water was always
coming over on the deck so they had to wear boots all of the time.
MR. GROSSMAN: Was this when it was stationed in…
MR. ESTRADA: It was in Tiburon. I guess that’s near San Francisco somewhere. I
don’t know how many years they used it, but they declared it an unstable platform.
They just couldn’t do anything with it and people were always getting sick out in the
Bay. Those P Boats roll something good when you get them broadside.
MR. GROSSMAN: They kind of have a round bottom.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, they are round and shiny. They had a good engine I’ll say that
for them. But anyway, they justified why they couldn’t use it because it wasn’t any
good as an unstable platform. The National Marine Fisheries justified why they needed a
boat just like that to use up in Kodiak. So they somehow how got the boat with their
justification that they needed a good stable boat, whatever it was. They took off and
brought the boat to Seattle. It rolled so bad that they took it in the yard there and put on
rolling shocks. They are kind of like fins that fit down under the boat in the water to
drag. They were fifteen inches wide and thirty feet long. They were supposed to drag
through the water to keep the boat from rolling. It helped a little bit, but their engineer
wasn’t that bright. The boat only drew four feet of water in the front, and eight feet in
the back. So when they were sitting in dry dock, of course, they put them on parallel to
the boat. Then they put the boat in the water and so they were about two and a half or
three feet higher in the front than they were in the back. It did help the boat from rolling
but it slowed it down. There was a lot of drag on it. They took it up to Kodiak, and
everybody got sick on it. They used it in Prince William Sound. They used it on two or
three trips. And they decided that it was an unstable platform. So they tied it up in
Kodiak and didn’t use it for about two years. They just couldn’t use it because at Kodiak
there is open Ocean. The original design was harbor tug, passengers and cargo. Harbor
tug means it’s for inland waters in the harbor. The Fish and Wildlife Service wrote up the
description to show that they needed that boat for their work, they justified that that
would be the boat we would want to have. This was after National Marine Fisheries de-justified
it.
MR. GROSSMAN: What was it called when it was stationed in Kodiak?
MR. ESTRADA: The Cripple Creek. The Bureau of Mines named it after Cripple
Creek, a mine that was down in northern California or Nevada. That named sounded like
it was a disease. That’s why it was renamed.
MR. GROSSMAN: How did you folks come up with the name?
MR. ESTRADA: Fish and Wildlife Service’s headquarters were in Portland at the time.
Alaska wasn’t a region. It was run out of Portland. I don’t know why, who or what
decided to rename the boat. But three names were picked. I had Goldeneye picked. And
somebody else had picked the Peregrine Falcon and the Curlew. I don’t know who
picked all of those names, but anyway, the name was chosen in Portland. They named it
for the endangered Eskimo Curlew. I think it was endangered at the time, or still is?
MR. GROSSMAN: It is considered extinct now.
MR. ESTRADA: That’s what the Curlew was named from, the Eskimo Curlew. They
did shorten the ‘Eskimo’ off of it. And I am glad it was named the Curlew instead of the
Goldeneye for some reason.
MR. GROSSMAN: Goldeneye would have been a good name also. So did they just ask
people to submit names?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’ t think there was anybody who was particularly asked. They
may have asked Robards since it was up in his area, or Wayne, or whatever it was. Or
maybe it was somebody in Portland. It wasn’t a contest or anything. It was pretty much
given. Nobody asked any opinions, they just told you what it was going to be.
MR. GROSSMAN: So then, the FWS justified getting it, and the timing was great for
you?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, they asked if I wanted to be Skipper. But I knew what it could
look like. I knew the Surf Birds. Surf Birds came out of Cosmolean when, I don’t know
what you’d want to call it. It was still new. It was still on a barge. Fred Robards and Sid
Morgan pretty much designed the way it was going to be; the crew’s quarters and the
galley and stuff. So I knew what the Cripple Creek was going to be like. I had a vision of
it. But was I disappointed. I almost quit when I got there. That’s when I found out it
was covered up in ice. It was tied up at the dock for a year and a half or two years. And
pardon the expression, but there was not “____” watched or supervised, the boat wasn’t.
The Hippies had moved aboard. They didn’t have anywhere to live, they’d do down
there. I don’t know how they got out on the base, but they did. I got on the boat and
took a look at it. There was wired running all over the place, just kind of plugged in to
some electric heaters. The bathrooms quit working. And after they did that they just
defecated in any corner they wanted to all over the boat. It had the old swinging chain
bunks up forward. I almost walked off.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was a pretty bad condition.
MR. ESTRADA: It was really bad. I mean, it was gaggy. I went to start the generators,
they wouldn’t run. I had to take one generator completely out and put another one in. I
am trying to remember but the DC generator didn’t run. The boats were all 101 direct
current. The engine didn’t run or the generator didn’t gen, I forget exactly. But anyway
we took the AC generator, which used to originally be the water pump for firefighting.
Somebody had taken those engines out. We took the engine out and replaced it with a
spare that was up there.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was the generator engine?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. We got it running and used it to keep the batteries charged up to
keep the all of the light and everything going. I spend about six weeks just scrapping out
the boat; cleaning it, washing it, hosing it down and redoing generators.
MR. GROSSMAN: And you got the main engine going too?
MR. ESTRADA: We got the main engine going. All of the heating system was all froze
out. All of the plugs were froze out. All of the radiator pipes were frozen and busted.
We eliminated those and used electric heaters just to keep the boat heated. I don’t
remember if the furnace ran or not. I didn’t run the furnace because the water piping and
everything was broken on it.
MR. GROSSMAN: Was your new boss then pretty good about providing you with the
support and funds that you needed?
MR. ESTRADA: They had the funding for it for the first year to do the modification on
it. But I guess, like I said, I knew what it could look like. It was a tough go.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you ended up sticking it out, and ?
MR. ESTRADA: We got her running and put he up on the ways. We scrubbed the
bottom. Bruce Connen, being an airplane pilot was qualified to navigate. Then he had
another airplane pilot up in Fairbanks. I don’t remember his name. He was also a pilot
so he could navigate. Then, there was George Putney and myself. So there was the four
of us and we decided to bring the boat down to Juneau. Of course, Bruce got sick right
off of the bat. The other guy got sick right off of the bat. But they stood their watches
and we did bring the boat to Juneau. Then we tore it apart. We went in there with
cutting torches and cut everything out of the crew’s quarters. We took all of the stuff out
that was done where we sleep today. We took it out and put in plywood walls and
insulation. We made it so that it is pretty much the way it is today; six beds down in
there. We cut out the galley out forward and made it into a sort of locker. They were
going to do diving so we kind of used if for a dive locker, which it still is.
MR. GROSSMAN: You set it up with an air compressor and tanks?
MR. ESTRADA: We didn’t have an air compressor at the time. We had one that was
portable sitting up on the deck.
MR. GROSSMAN: I see.
MR. ESTRADA: And then we went into what is todays galley where all the bus seats
used to be. We cut everything out of that, part of the wall we cut out. We moved it
forward towards the one going to the engine room. Then we lined the whole area in there
and put in the settee and the kitchen sink and stoves. It’s a galley not a kitchen sink! I
am forgetting where I am. We did all of that between December and May, which was my
first trip out.
MR. GROSSMAN: So it five months time, or less, four months I guess. You
completely retrofitted the whole boat.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, we retrofitted the whole boat. And we had two electric
generator motors, one AC and one DC to make electricity. I remember getting the DC one
fixed. We didn’t have any AC on the boat. We got rid of all of the AC [electric current].
We bought a DC refrigerator/freezer. The stove was an oil fired stove. The lights were
just DC.
MR. GROSSMAN: Now, a lot of it has been converted back to AC.
MR. ESTRADA: Well they never were AC to start with.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I see.
MR. ESTRADA: A lot of it was just wires hanging all over. The furnaces and
everything were Waywolf [spelling?] Furnaces. And they had basically a motor to run
the igniter and everything. But they had and AC/DC motor, and the DC ran the motor
but they had AC slip rings to create AC to fire the transformer. The transformer was for
the igniters. They wouldn’t work on DC so they needed AC. And Leland made that
motor and they just quit making it.
MR. GROSSMAN: That made it pretty tough to maintain something like that.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah.
MR. GROSSMAN: But over time you just continued to make little improvements and
help bring it up to what it is today. Which is, I guess, in most people’s opinion a pretty
great work platform for the inside waters.
MR. ESTRADA: That’s exactly what it was for. And it worked great on the inside
waters. Then back in about 1989 during the oil spill, somebody decided to take the boat
up to Cordova, or Prince William Sound. That was a wild ride!
MR. GROSSMAN: Was that because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. Prior to that, remember I told they put those rolling chaugs [?]
on the boat?
MR. GROSSMAN: Right.
MR. ESTRADA: I looked at them and evaluated them. One time we had the boat in the
yard. I had them cut those rolling chaugs off. I know they had left them. There was
three-inch angle iron that was welded to the hull. I had them cut the rest of the twelve
inches off. So right now, they are only three inches. In running the boat, it gets the same
RPM. It picked up almost two knots of speed. That’s how badly they were put on.
And the boat didn’t roll any more or any less after we cut them off.
MR. GROSSMAN: Did you put the stabilizer polls on then to help?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, we went up to Prince William Sound that first year for the oil
spill and before I came back, I decided to put these stabilizer polls on it. That made an
altogether different boat out of it. But those, following sea, those T Boats just do not
steer. They get up, and the back end wants to swap around on us. And you had to fight
that steering wheel all of the time. So by putting the stabilizer polls on, or a pair on
mains, if you want to call that; they are twenty-five feet long so there is a fifty-foot
spread on them. There were thirty-two inch parimanes. You could get in a following sea
and the parimanes would seem to hold the boat steady. It took all of the roll; not all of
the roll, it took ninety percent of the roll out. Instead of rolling over on a wave, it just
kind of went down with the wave. It rides a lot better. But it’s still not designed for
ocean.
MR. GROSSMAN: It’s still better on the inside waters? But when it kicks up on the
inside a little bit that makes it a little more comfortable?
MR. ESTRADA: Oh yeah! It makes it easy to steer, and it makes it more comfortable.
MR. GROSSMAN: Well Ted, I want to shift gears a little bit on you. I know that you
worked with lots and lots of different folks. Can you describe some of the major projects
or issues that you were involved in providing support for over the years?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, the major thing for the boat was to do evaluations of the
estuaries. As far as permits are going, our first couple of years we went out to a lot of the
different bays, which were proposed as log transfer facilities. So we went out and did
complete inventories of these bays. We set pots, and gill nets and we did the fishery in
the bay. We did low tide beach surveys, just walked along the edge of the beach and made
pictures of the outcroppings, the rocks and the stuff that was in there. We’d go into a
bay and spend ten days to two weeks just to do an evaluation. That’s what the original
intent of it was. Then, it’s kind of gradually escaped that and it went specific. They’re
gonna put a dumpsite on such and such a point, or up at a creek and it eventually went
specific to that. We’d go into a Bay and explore that area and make recommendations on
whether or not to have the project go or not go. It’s always been a diving platform since I
was on the boat. There’s a few other things that we have done. We did a lot of bird
survey work off of it, and eagle work. But it’s original intent was to do the estuary
studies.
MR. GROSSMAN: So that was the Ecological Services Division?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah.
MR. GROSSMAN: And the eagle work would have been Raptor Management, which is
under Migratory Birds.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and we just incorporated that when we were doing a Bay.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I see.
MR ESTRADA: When we were doing a bay evaluation we’d go and look for the eagle
nests and stuff that were in the bay.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, so you are locating the eagle nests and marking them while you
were in there for other projects?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and we’d give the information to the eagle management people.
MR. GROSSMAN: And you were part of the trans-location work when they were
moving eagles to down south?
MR. ESTRADA: They moved them to Tennessee.
MR. GROSSMAN: Tennessee, where you now live.
MR. ESTRADA: They did several different trans-locations. But the one in particular;
I’ve been on three different ones, but the one particular that I remember, I think it was
1991 or 1992. We took some people from Crossville, TN out, and they took twenty-four
baby eagles and they flew them down to Tennessee and put them in hacking towers.
Today, a friend of mine who lives down there says that those eagles we took down there
are producing young that have all made it up. So they are all doing well.
MR. GROSSMAN: Did you do anything with marine mammals like sea lions, seals, or
otters or anything along those lines?
MR. ESTRADA: I think we were involved with a trade off with the goat out of
Ketchikan. I think the State was doing it, but I forget why we were there. It was
Mountain Goat stuff. They were transferred down to Oregon in the Shasta Mountains or
somewhere. I don’t know what happened. They said that one of them was still headed
for Mexico! I guess he was looking for a warmer climate. I think we were involved with
that. We did a lot of Sea Otter surveys. I guess they were doing a lot of Sea Otter counts
after they were transferred in 1960 something. It was the time that they did the atomic
exploration out on Shimia. They buried a bunch of stuff and were trying to simulate an
earthquake or something. They shipped a bunch of Sea Otter out bound for southeast
Alaska out of Cape Spencer, Surge Bay on Yakobe Island. They were dropped at White
Sisters, and down at Neccer Island. [Place name spelling?] I am just trying to remember
all of the places that they went to. They went farther south into the Prince of Wales
group so we went back and did Sea Otter counts.
MR. GROSSMAN: So, the ones that were wiped out by during Russian fur trade were
reintroduced from the Aleutians and then you guys were doing follow up to see how
many and where they had spread to? Today they are still expanding!
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. And there is plenty of them. I don’t know if the State is taking
care of that or it is still a Federal charge.
MR. GROSSMAN: Yeah, it’s still a Federal job. Were there any of the projects that
you enjoyed the most?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, I really like the Sea Otters surveys. I just really enjoyed getting
out and seeing them and counting them. The estuary work, well…
MR. GROSSMAN: Did it get kind of boring for you?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, it’s kind of like skiff tending.
MR. GROSSMAN: Basically you’d just hole up somewhere and sit and wait on these
guys, and that wasn’t too interesting. It sounds like you liked the part of moving around
and doing things?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, where I could be part of it. Like, I think it was in 1995 when
you were up on the islands.
MR. GROSSMAN: I spent time in the Aleutians.
MR. ESTRADA: I was up in the Barren Islands out of Homer, just east of Kodiak.
They were doing bird counts of the islands up there. Now, I enjoyed that. That was
neat. It was fun. And it was new for me up there. Although I had been out in the
Aleutians Chains and all of the way the Previlovs with other boats. I enjoyed that quite a
bit out there. Running transects, or just running the boat was a challenge. Not really a
challenge, but it was something different to do. Ed was up there sitting out in the wind
and the rain counting ducks and I was in the wheelhouse drinking coffee.
MR. GROSSMAN: There are some perks with your job! Was there any particular high
point in your career Ted? You were with the Service for over twenty years.
MR. ESTRADA: I was with the Service for twenty-five years.
MR. GROSSMAN: When was it that you retired?
MR. ESTRADA: That was January 3, 1997.
MR. GROSSMAN: In 1997, so in twenty-five years, was there one particular high
point?
MR. ESTRADA: Man, you’ve got me thinking. Because you know, the whole thing
was a high point. It was a job without having to work!
MR. GROSSMAN: So it was more of a Federal vacation for you then?
MR. ESTRADA: It was all fun. I mean there was areas…. As a child, I never grew up in
west coast of Prince of Wales Island and traveling around in there, I enjoyed it. It was
new to me. There were places that were new to me. There were places that I didn’t like.
A lot of them I called ‘backwater sloughs’. I liked the coastal areas, they were always a
challenge and different for me.
MR. GROSSMAN: All of the various projects, all over, took you into new country.
Would you say that that exploring was the high point?
MR. ESTRADA: I can go into Bogadequadra [sounds like] where they put in the
Millennium mine.
MR. GROSSMAN: Quartz Hill.
MR. ESTRADA: That was new because we were doing a survey of what’s in there. We
barrowed some King Crab pots and a bunch of other stuff and set King Crab pots all up
and down the bays in there. We set Shrimp pots along the edges of the cliffs. We got
some beautiful Prawns. They were the nice big foot-long ones. Those were some of the
perks.
MR. GROSSMAN: So those were some of the side benefits; fresh seafood, and exploring
new places?
MR. ESTRADA: Bogadequadra is to some people, a pretty place. To me, it’s a
backwater slough. There was food in there.
MR. GROSSMAN: What about a low point Ted?
MR. ESTRADA: The lowest point in my life was when the reduction gear went out on
the boat and it was tied up for a year and a half. We couldn’t use the boat. We just sat
around and sat around until they got enough money. It took about a quarter million
bucks. We finally took the boat south. We got it running enough by putting shims and
used parts in the reduction gear. The engine in that boat was a 375 CAT, which is no
longer in service. The reduction gear was made by Snow and Amsted. I’d say that fifty
years ago or before, it was sold out to a Mexican outfit down in Mexico, so we didn’t
have any parts. There were no parts available for it other than what you could find out of
scrap. So, I forget what year it was that we changed the engine out in the boat. Then, life
for me picked up again.
MR. GROSSMAN: I think it was probably 1992, or around in there that you got in re-powered
that fall.
MR. ESTRADA: Then, life started to pick up again. We got the boat alive and running.
We took it down to Billingham, Washington and they cut an eight by six-foot hole right in
the side of the boat! They stripped the engine room. At that time we put in two
generators that we got free, from NOAA. The price was right on those! And we put a
new 3408 CAT in there. That was held up pretty much all winter, the project was. But
it was nice to have a new engine in there. It used more fuel! [Higher capacity]
MR. GROSSMAN: It used less fuel, and weighed considerably less.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, it weighed a whole lot less and they had to make up the weight
difference by putting lead bars in the bottom of the boat. They used two or three tons of
lead bars.
MR. GROSSMAN: Just for ballast?
MR. ESTRADA: Just to bring the boat down. It’s still not as deep as it originally was.
It’s stilling running about six inches light. Then we put new hydraulic steering in. The
old cable system, we took that out. There are hydraulic rams back on the rudder. That
was really faster than having cables running off of shives. It broke one time in the middle
of winter out in the middle of the Chatham Straits, the cable did. So we braided some
rope and put some splices in the broken cable. I don’t remember how we did it, but we
tied rope between them. We were able to make it around for the rest of the trip.
MR. GROSSMAN: If I recall Ted, basically because of your industrious nature you
never lost a day in the field because of equipment failure. You were always able to jury-rig
something.
MR. ESTRADA: I know where you are going with this!
MR. GROSSMAN: Yeah, there’s a couple of famous stories. Can you tell me about the
time you repaired the generator with a stove part?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. We bent a push rod on the onnen generator. So we were out of
electricity. We had these stainless guards on the galley stove. It was an Olympic stove, I
think. So I took one of the guards down there. They are round, and about the same
dimension. It think it’s about 5/16” round. We took a file and a hacksaw and cut them to
length and made it fit, stuck it in the generator and we finished off the day, and the rest of
the whole trip running off of that until we got new push rods for it.
MR. GROSSMAN: Are there any other major jury-rigs that you were able to
accomplish in the field like that?
MR. ESTRADA: One was an outboard. I forget there was a little spring in there on the
starter. We couldn’t get this electric started working and we couldn’t crank it by hand.
So I was looking for a spring that fell overboard or something, or broke or what. I was
looking around and finally took one out of the base of a flashlight. I got that placed in the
starter and it worked for the rest of the trip didn’t it?
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s right, I remember that!
MR. ESTRADA: There was just a lot of little things.
MR. GROSSMAN: You always seemed to have a part or a tool that would get you
through. In all of your time out, was there a particularly dangerous or frightening
experience that you had?
MR. ESTRADA: There was. In 1990, I was going back up to Prince William Sound in
March. Dan Alrey was my cook, and Don Williamson. We were supposed to have a
good weather window for going across. But just before we got to Yakutat something
happened. The weather set in. The winds were blowing sixty and seventy. We were
quite a ways off the beach. I was on my way to Yakutat. We were getting closer and
closer and there was a southeaster on my tail. Those seas got up to twenty-four to thirty
feet. Three of us were in the wheelhouse with our survival suits on, tied around our
waists. We got out there, and just kept heading for Yakutat. It was a tug in the bay and
he talked to me every ten minutes. He came out in the bay. He had dropped his barge.
He came out in the bay and stood by the buoy talking to me every ten minutes until I got
in to the bay. I was scared. I remember one wave breaking and crashing down on the
back deck. The windows on the Curlew are twenty-four by thirty glass windows. So
when you have a wave crash down, I thought we were going to have broken windows.
That was probably one of my worst fears that I ever had with the boat. Other than the
time when I had let it go dry once. We were anchored at place called Beyond Grief Island
[sounds like] beyond Duncan Canal. There was a donut hole out there. There was just
enough room for one boat to anchor, and you’ve got to anchor in the middle of it. I went
around and found the hole. But it was an extreme low tide the next morning. As the tide
went out, my anchor line got longer. I ended up with the back of the boat sitting up on
the side of the bank. The stern was dry and the bow was still afloat. I didn’t fear loosing
it.
MR. GROSSMAN: It was embarrassing, particular when it ends up on a photo.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. When somebody takes a picture of it.
MR. GROSSMAN: But there was no harm done. What about, I know that you were
always very light-hearted about your trips. Was there one particular, or several
humorous experiences that you can remember which really stood out? I guess it’s hard to
narrow it down.
MR. ESTRADA: I can’t think of anything that was really humorous that I’d want to
talk about. [On tape]
MR. GROSSMAN: I see, OK. [Laughing]
MR. ESTRADA: I did find places in the west coast of Prince of Wales where there were
uncharted rocks. I found a lot of them. I marked a lot of them on different charts that I
had on the boat. I marked where they were. Everybody says, “No it’s not there, it’s
here”. I had a friend who was on the Sundance, another one of the Fish and Game boats;
they also found it. They couldn’t have been dangerous because they were over twelve
feet.
MR. GROSSMAN: So the bottom line is that the charts are pretty good but they are not
perfect?
MR. ESTRADA: They are not perfect, no.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you, being someone that’s familiar with the terrain…
MR. ESTRADA: You’ve got to think about it. There’s places on the west coast of
Chicagof Island where are rock where they are not supposed to be. A lot of them I
marked. I think a lot of them are back on the charts again, that I located; not
purposefully, but…
MR. GROSSMAN: Over that time, Ted, you’ve seen an awful lot of changes in the
FWS. Can you comment on that?
MR. ESTRADA: Personnel, I’ve seen change. Originally, in the Juneau Field Office, the
only one left is Jack Hodges who was on the boat in the first year I think, and Bruce
Connen and Jake. The other ones are in the southeast. I don’t know what’s up north. I
have seen a lot of the Regional Directors change. I don’t even remember them. There was
Gordy Watson, and Shriner, and Butz. Who was the one when you were here?
MR. GROSSMAN: It think it was Stillwell, oh, or Walt Stigletts, and now Dave Allen.
So, personnel has turned over a lot?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, personnel has changed a lot.
MR. GROSSMAN: How about programs?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t know where the program is. The original concept of it is
basically still here. That’s Ecological Service protecting the estuaries, as far as putting in
log transfer facilities, which I don’t think they are doing much of. Dock and Harbors, and
Compliance are still there. We did a lot of Compliance work.
MR. GROSSMAN: I know that incidental to various missions you performed at least a
couple of rescues of other boaters didn’t you?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. The first one was done out of Craig. There was a May Day and
we went bombing out the bay. We were already moving when this happened. There was
a boat going dry up on the rocks and the waves were crashing on it. I got as close as I
could, and I sent somebody; I can’t remember who was with me, on a thirteen foot
Boston Whaler to get it close to get them off. It was fairly rough. And it was kind of
humorous because the first thing that came off was two rolls of “snoos”.
MR. GROSSMAN: You don’t want to get that wet.
MR. ESTRADA: The next thing that came off was a couple of chain saws. I don’t know
how much beer they had had, but it was quite a bit. We got them off and took them back
to the Craig. They just left the boat there. It busted up. In fact, it busted up before we
left. Another one was a more serious one. It was about fourteen miles north of Sitka. I
don’t remember exactly, what happened, but after talking to the people I kind of put
things together on this one. Their boat caught fire in the evening. It was a pleasure
cruiser. There was a propane explosion in the galley. The boat burned to the water line
and the people said that there were at least eight boats that went by them and never
bothered to stop. There was black smoke rolling from the fiberglass burning, and
everything else. They made it to the beach. They got severely burned. I was coming
back from the outside coast and I see this black smoke at seven o’clock in the morning or
something like that. What they did was they one of the fender tires or something from
the boat was afloat and still burning. It had floated ashore. They got a fire going with
that. We went in there and pulled them off. We called the Coast Guard but they couldn’t
get out. There was two firefighters, or two troopers out fishing and they had lot faster
boat that I had. We took them on the boat and got them stabilized. We got some warm
tea into them. They were badly burned. I forget exactly what was done on board. They
put them in that fast skiff and they had them in the hospital in Sitka in twenty minutes.
There was a letter written that I still have at home, that was written about it in the Sitka
Sentinel. There was another boat over in Wrangell that had broke down. It was a small
twenty-four footer. All of his wiring was bad. We picked the guy up and were going to
take him in to Wrangell. Instead, we took him into Shoemaker Cove. No, I took him in to
Wrangell. He wanted to go in to Shoemaker Cove because Wrangell was closer. But he
didn’t want to. We got him in there, and come to find out, he had a bunch of dope and
stuff on the boat. That’s why he didn’t want to go to Wrangell. He was wanted. He got
picked up there!
MR. GROSSMAN: So that was more of a Police mission then.
MR. ESTRADA: Well, yeah. He was out drifting, so….
MR. GROSSMAN: Well, that’s pretty much most of the questions that I had Ted,
which was an awful lot. Did you ever fill in any of the other Service boats like the Surf
Bird or the Aleutian Tern?
MR. ESTRADA: I made two or three trips across the gulf on the Aleutian Tern, when
they were bringing the boat back and forth with a Skipper on it. I had taken the Surf Bird
out on a couple of trips. We didn’t mention anything about how the Curlew was used for
two years in a row in Prince William Sound during the oil spill. In fact, the Curlew was
the first government boat on the scene other than the Coast Guard.
MR. GROSSMAN: Wow! And that’s several day steaming to get there isn’t it?
MR. ESTRADA: It’s seventy-two hours from the time that it happened.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you just basically heard the news and took off. Whoever it was
told us to, “Git!”. [Go there fast]. So we just grabbed a bunch of groceries and away we
went. The first mission of course was “what are we going to do when we get there?” So
we ended up picking up dead animals and dead birds. There were a lot of boats out
picking up off of the beaches. I don’t recall whether we got live ones or dead ones. I
think we picking up dead ones and bringing them in.
MR. GROSSMAN: Was that to keep the scavengers from getting on them?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. The first year we did that. The second year, they were doing a
bird study. It think it was Migratory Birds that used the Curlew up there. They were
doing a lot of simulation work. I don’t want to say this but I consider it a real waste of
hard earned money.
MR. GROSSMAN: Is there anything else that you can think of that might help in the
understanding the history or the involvement of these boats?
MR. ESTRADA: I could say that those Army T-boats, built in 1953 were designed for
harbor and not the ocean. They were good for what they were intended for.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you would say that they are an excellent work platform in inside
waters?
MR. ESTRADA: In inside waters. The Park Service has one called the Nunitank. Fish
and Wildlife has the Surf Bird. Fish and Game has the Polaris, which was originally the
Aleutian Tern; the one Putney was running. Dale Hanson was one down in Ketchikan.
He uses it for rough salvage.
MR. GROSSMAN: Is that the Alaskan Salvor?
MR. ESTRADA: He has a decompression chamber on there.
MR. GROSSMAN: There’s the Enforcer.
MR. ESTRADA: The State Troopers have The Enforcer.
MR. GROSSMAN: I know that there’s a private one called The Hobbitt.
MR. ESTRADA: My buddy has The Hobbitt. And he has made a yacht out of it.
There’s another one called the Mary Ann down in Seattle. He cut the cabin off and
moved it ahead fifteen feet. He had a big afterdeck and he Tuna fishes with it. There’s
another one that they use for Tuna fishing that is altogether rigged different. So they’ve
have used them a lot. I think down in Florida, where it be Florida State, or Fish and
Wildlife, there is some agency uses one as a research boat. They have them on the Great
Lakes. Those are used for research. I don’t know how many of them were built. I like
them. They were built out of cored tin steel for the Korean War. And the reason us
because cored tin is ten percent stainless. That made the middle tougher and basically
bullet proof. With the war at that time, it wasn’t necessarily bullet proof, but it helped.
It made is rubbery. It was like shooting at rubber, I guess. The stainless being soft, it
was more flexible.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you’ve gone through a few drill bits in your day, trying to drill
through for various purposes?
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, lots of drill bits! The other thing that changed on there; I went to
a four bladed propeller, rather than the three. It got rid of a lot of vibration. There’s been
a lot of changes it went through, but it’s still a T-boat.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you’ve improved it greatly but it still needs to be…
MR. ESTRADA: It needs to be used for what it was intended for.
MR. GROSSMAN: You retired in when?
MR. ESTRADA: January 3, 1997. I moved and lived in Washington State for about six
months. Then I picked up and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. It is thirty miles north of
Chattanooga. I love it there. I still have my license to run boats but I also have a Bus
Driver’s license now. I am driving a School Bus.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you can navigate on land and water!
MR. ESTRADA: Right!
MR. GROSSMAN: Well, I want to thank you Ted. This is really wonderful. Certainly
no one knows the Curlew more than you.
MR. ESTRADA: Well, I think Joe knows the Curlew pretty well. I still get calls from
Joe.
MR. GROSSMAN: We’ll certainly interview him too. I sure appreciate this, and get
you copies of the transcript. If you think of anything else in the meantime… I do greatly
appreciate the pictures. We’ll make some copies and exchange a few. Thank you.
END
Transcribed by;
Sarah Cargill
4909 General Anderson Court
Sharpsburg, MD 21782
301 432 7703
Vagirl@peoplepc.com

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

INTERVIEW WITH TED ESTRADA
BY ED GROSSMAN AUGUST 7, 2001
MR. GROSSMAN: Today I have Ted Estrada here. He is a former Skipper, and an
original Skipper for the Fish and Wildlife Service of the motor vessel Curlew. We are at
the USFWS Juneau Field Office. The date is the 7th of August 2001. The Field Office is
in Juneau, Alaska at Vintage Park. This is Ed Grossman conducting the interview.
I guess for the benefit of the audience, I’d like to get a little information on your
background, first of all your personal background. Can you tell where you were born and
what date that was?
MR. ESTRADA: I was born in a leap year; February 29, 1936 in Wrangell, Alaska.
MR. GROSSMAN: So how old would that make you now?
MR. ESTRADA: I’ve had sixteen birthdays. I am the same age as my granddaughter.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you are just old enough to drive now!
MR. ESTRADA: Just old enough to drive, depending on what state you are in.
MR. GROSSMAN: You’ll be eligible for the next war if we have one.
MR. ESTRADA: I guess, I’m not keen on that!
MR. GROSSMAN: And your parent’s names?
MR. ESTRADA: My dad was a full-blooded Spaniard. His full name was Guillermo
Estrada. Guillermo translated to William and he was called Bill. He comes from
Colorado. He came up to Alaska when he was fourteen years old. He had been to Russia
and back. My mother was from Washington State. She was born on Camano Island. She
was Shamus Indian and a bunch of other stuff. She came to Alaska when she was seven
years old. He name was Alethea.
MR. GROSSMAN: So at seven years old, did she come up with her parents?
MR. ESTRADA: She came with her parents, but her parents divorced. She had five
children. My oldest sister Mehangalia, the next sister was Willow, myself, my brother
Phil. His Spanish name is Philverno. Then I have a younger sister Molly. Believe it or
not, today, we are all over sixty and all still alive.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s fabulous. Your father, he had a different means of getting to
Alaska as I recall.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. He stowed away on different steamers coming up. He ended up
where he didn’t want to end up, in Prince William Sound. He was trying to go to
Ketchikan. So he worked at the Kendicott Mine up at Cordova. He stowed away to
come back down southeast and he ended up in Seattle and in San Francisco. Then he
hopped rail cars to go back and forth to wherever he wanted to go.
MR. GROSSMAN: When they were up here together, what was it that they were doing?
MR. ESTRADA: Dad was a fisherman. He trawled commercially. He could tell you
stories about being out on Forrester Island in a small boat, rowing, and trawling with
cotton line. He would catch King Salmon and sell them for ten cents apiece. That’s
probably before I was born.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s ten cents apiece as apposed to the pound.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and he had to deliver twice a day.
MR. GROSSMAN: My goodness!
MR. ESTRADA: But he liked to get out. He did a lot of hunting. We lived, not in
towns for most of our early lives. I remember being in Port Alexander when they were
fishing down there. I remember being in Wrangell very little. I was pretty young.
Somewhere in the middle forties we moved up to Elfin Cove. We lived there just in the
summers. We spent some winters there.
MR. GROSSMAN: Elfin Cove is on the north end of Chichagof Island.
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, and in fact if you look at the treasure maps of Alaska you’ll find
that the Estrada family lived at Bingham Cove.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s on the north end of Yakobi Island.
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, and that was in the 1950’s that we lived out there.
MR. GROSSMAN: If I remember from those accounts, I guess your Dad was doing
fishing and then your mother had a laundry business, is that right?
MR. ESTRADA: We were the only family that ever lived there. It was an island right in
the middle of the bay. My mother did laundry. We had two big tents. There was a
drying tent, and we lived in a tent. The washing machine had a Briggs and Stratton to run
the machines. We had to haul water across the bay in a skiff because there was no water
on the island. There we no animals either. Bingham Cove is known for the bear and stuff
that are out there.
MR. GROSSMAN: So being on the island you avoided some of the troubles with the
bear?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and it was neat place to be raised. Everything was outside. And
you had fish. If I remember right, we had game all year long.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you were born here in Juneau?
MR. ESTRADA: I was born in Wrangell.
MR. GROSSMAN: But the other siblings?
MR. ESTRADA: Let’s see…my older sister was born in Wrangell, Willow was born in
Juneau, my brother and I were born in Wrangell and believe it or not, my youngest sister
was born at Cass Bay on the west coast of Chicahagof Island on the boat. She was
registered born at Kimshan Cove, which was a mining community at that time. And
there was a Post Office there. That was in 1939.
MR. GROSSMAN: And all of that is gone now?
MR. ESTRADA: It’s just in ruins now. My grandmother was a person that helps with
the birthing. Not a birthing mother, but whatever you call the person that helps.
MR. GROSSMAN: So then, as you got older you worked your way into the fishing
business did you?
MR. ESTRADA: Before I was old enough to supposedly run machinery, I had fished
with Dad before that; but I went to work for a man called Ernie Swanson who was the
founder or Elfin Cove, on his fish packing boat. It was fifty footer. We used to buy fish
out in the northwestern part of Yacovia Island and Deer Harbor, Elfin Cove and Bingham
Cove. We’d haul our fish to Juneau, which was 110 miles away. We’d buy fish for about
three or four days and then run to Juneau; deliver the fish, pick up groceries and come
back. We’d offload the groceries in the store out at Elfin Cove and then we’d hit the
fishing grounds again. I kind of was like a baseball team. I was traded. Gil Bixby and
Peterson bought the outfit; the boat. I stayed with it. Then Bixby bought out Peterson, I
stayed with the boat until 1959. But all of that time I was involved in buying fish.
That’s where I learned to run boats. Gil Bixby was my mentor at that time. He pretty
much gave me the boat to run.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you, by delivering the fish, got a percentage then?
MR. ESTRADA: Depending on the size of fish or brand there was three to five cents a
pound broker fee, I guess you’d call it. That was between the fisherman and the delivery.
That way, the only other cold storage was at Pelican at that time I think. Later in years it
was at Pelican, but I remember Ernie ran all of his fish to Juneau because he had to buy
groceries and supplies for his store. That’s why he ran to Juneau.
MR. GROSSMAN: Which in turn was bought by the fishermen that you were buying
from.
MR. ESTRADA: He had a general store out there. To me, when I was young, it was big.
But at six years old in Elfin Cove, I made $49.50 that summer. A friend of mine, Walt
Larson who used to live there, we used to run the hand trucks up and down the dock and
from the boat into the warehouse. Once or twice a week we’d do that. The reason I
didn’t make $50.00 that summer was because I had wood to cut or water to pack or
something. But I didn’t do my chores and Dad wouldn’t let me go and run the hand
trucks to haul wood. That’s why I remember it was $49.50 for the summer. I was six
years old.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you spent most of your early years around west Chichagof,
Yacobi, Elfin Cove and Pelican?
MR. ESTRADA: Up until 1959, which would have made me twenty-four years old, or
something like that.
MR. GROSSMAN: And 1959 kind of rings a bell; that was the year of Statehood wasn’t
it?
MR. ESTRADA: It was the year of Statehood. It was the year that I got Polio.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh.
MR. ESTRADA: I was pretty much paralyzed but I overcame that in a couple of years.
But I had to get off of the water. My first year, 1960, after Statehood, I started working
for Fish and Game. I was able to run one of their little thirty-two foot research boats out
counting seine boats and the amount of gear that was out; observing the biologists
counting the amount of fish. Some people were walking the streams then, but I couldn’t
really get out and do that kind of work. That’s when I started running boats for State
Fish and Game.
MR. GROSSMAN: Because of your recovering from Polio you were better able to run
the vessel than do the ship to shore duties?
MR. ESTRADA: I couldn’t walk well. I still today can’t walk well on a beach. That’s
when my legs kind of went out from under me. I still have that problem. But a rocking
boat don’t bother me a bit, as long as I’ve got something to hang on to.
MR. GROSSMAN: Do you have any particular hobbies? Was there anything that really
caught your interest on the side, besides running boats?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t remember having any particular hobbies. Today of course, I
like growing flower believe it or not. It seems a big change.
MR. GROSSMAN: I’ve seen some of your pictures. You are very talented, and have a
green thumb for sure.
MR. ESTRADA: I like to fish. But if I’m not going to catch any, I don’t like to fish. I
can’t see sitting out in a boat for hours and hours, just drowning herring. I loose interest
real fast. I am not a fresh water-fishing enthusiast whatsoever.
MR. GROSSMAN: Just salt water. So how about, was there any particular events that
you felt influenced your life the most?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t know. I remember the first time that Ernie Swanson let me run
the Elfin 2 that was the name of his boat. I felt powerful. The boat was big, I was small
and I had control of it. It made me feel good. “Everybody, look at me, I am running the
boat”! And I was young then.
MR. GROSSMAN: So that pretty much helped you decide that’s what you wanted to
do as a career?
MR. ESTRADA: I had a hard time at school with literature and math. I graduated from
High School, but that wasn’t interesting; to go on and be an executive somewhere. I just
wanted to go, and be on the water. I liked it.
MR. GROSSMAN: How many boats would you say that you’ve either owned or run in
your career?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, there was Dad’s fishing boat, the Elfin 2, the Elfin 3, then I went
on to Fish and Game. I had several of their little small boats that I ran. Then I went to a
Patrol boat for Fish and Game in 1962. It was a forty-four foot boat called the Skipjack.
It was under law enforcement and the State Troopers. Fish and Game owned the
Protection Division, that’s what it was called then. I don’t remember when it transferred
over to the State Troopers.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was called Fish and Wildlife Protection, right?
MR. ESTRADA: Then it was just Fish and Game Protection at that time. I was
assigned to the Sitka District, which took it’s bearing off of Chichagof on the west side of
Admiralty Island. That’s where I was assigned. Then they decided that I was getting
good enough so they transferred me to Seldovia to a bigger boat. I had passed my test for
a Boat Officer. They graduated me and transferred me to Seldovia. I didn’t like Seldovia
so I quit.
MR. GROSSMAN: Where is Seldovia at?
MR. ESTRADA: Across from Homer.
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s the Cook Inlet area isn’t it?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. I am trying to think of the name of the guy who was the Vessel
Supervisor at that time. The Skipper that was up there in Kodiak didn’t want to be in
Kodiak, I didn’t want to be in Seldovia but he wouldn’t let us swap. We both wanted to
swap. So we ended up both quitting. That’s where George Putney comes into the
picture.
MR. GROSSMAN: I see, and how does he come into the picture?
MR. ESTRADA: He picked up the boat that I wanted to run out of Kodiak, and he was
running it. But he ran a similar boat before that.
MR. GROSSMAN: And what kind was that?
MR. ESTRADA: Power scows; eighty-three or eighty-eight foot power scows.
MR. GROSSMAN: So when you quit, did you move back to southeast Alaska?
MR. ESTRADA: I moved back to Juneau and went to work at Northern Commercial
Company. I was working for them for about a year. That’s when the University of
Alaska came in with the Marine Science Center, which was in Douglas. I got onboard
their boat as an Assistant Engineer. That was in 1964.
MR. GROSSMAN: What was the name of that boat?
MR. ESTRADA: It was the Acona. It was a ninety-five foot, 300 ton. That was the
only job open was the Assistant Engineer on there. Within a year I was on as First Mate.
I stayed with them until they moved the Marine Science Center up to Seward. I became
Skipper sometime in there. When they moved up to Seward they had another boat in
Juneau called the Ursa Minor, which again was an eighty-eight foot power scow. Wait a
minute, wrong length. It was eighty-three feet and 188 ton. I ran that for two years and
they decided to get rid of it. That was about the time that Fish and Wildlife Service got
the Curlew. So I just moved over.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you weren’t with the Fish and Wildlife Service prior to the
purchase or transfer of the Curlew?
MR. ESTRADA: I was.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, you were?
MR. ESTRADA: I was the transfer.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I see, it was boat and Skipper?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, boat and Skipper.
MR. GROSSMAN: You mentioned that you finished High School. Where did you go to
High School?
MR. ESTRADA: The first year of grade school was in Juneau. We lived on the boat in
the boat harbor. Then I think the next year we moved to the house across the bridge.
There was a white house down there where the new bridge is now. The house is gone.
Then from the second year, I went through grade school in Douglas. The first year of
High School was in Douglas. And then for some unknown reason, I think I know the
reason, I decided to leave home. So I went to Shelton Jackson in Sitka, which was a
Presbyterian boarding school. I finished my High School there. I just needed…I was
smarted than my Dad. At fourteen years old I needed to get out on my own.
MR. GROSSMAN: Isn’t that the case with all fourteen year olds?
MR. ESTRADA: That’s right. [Both laughing] That cost me five hundred dollars a year
at school. And we had to work ten hours a week at the school, at Shelton Jackson.
MR. GROSSMAN: Where you helping with maintenance and that sort of thing?
MR. ESTRADA: We worked in the kitchen, the laundry; we worked in the Boiler room,
helped with construction. I enjoyed taking a class that was in the Machine Shop. They
had a boat building shop where they’d build boats. They had a wood shop. They had a
sawmill. We used to go out and bring our own logs in and rig up the sawmill and cut our
own lumber to build own buildings. That was an education in itself, at the sawmill.
Learning how to use; we got to use all of the saws, the gain saws and all of that.
MR. GROSSMAN: So it sounds like all of the hands on programs there is what really
equipped you for your work.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. You got to do a lot of things. The old boilers burn crude oil,
you know. We used to start them with catalogs to get the fire started. I’ve seen them
shut them down at night and get up a four o’clock in the morning and have to fire them off
again so there was hot water and heat in the buildings.
MR. GROSSMAN: I imagine that took quite a bit of maintenance too.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and as young kids working in the laundry, if you had somebody
you wanted to tease you’d starch his shorts for him! There was a lot of tomfoolery. The
kitchen was another neat place. You learned how to cook. We had a Dietician. We
usually worked six weeks at one spot. The first week in the kitchen you worked peeling
potatoes. That was your job. Later, you got to move on to the stove and cook. That
was more good training. Shelton Jackson had an excellent school as far as hands on. I
learned a lot of stuff from in there.
MR. GROSSMAN: Great! Ted, were you ever in the military services at all?
MR. ESTRADA: Never. I made the mistake of getting married. That relieved me of
being in the service. There was a kid involved. So I think I was classified as 2-F or
something like that. I think it was 1957. Then I got polio in 1959 so that put me at 4-F
so I never was in the military.
MR. GROSSMAN: Would that have been the Korean Conflict?
MR. ESTRADA: The end of the Korean Conflict. I did graduate from High School in
1955.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was out of Sitka?
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, out of Sitka at Shelton Jackson.
MR. GROSSMAN: How did you meet your current spouse?
MR. ESTRADA: My current, or which one? I think I’ve been married four times. The
first time was six months. The second time was a childhood girlfriend. I met her when
she was thirteen. We have our kids, and she died at the age of 36 with a ruptured barrier
aneurysm, so I finished raising the three kids. Then I did a rebound marriage that lasted
three months. Then I married my present wife, Juanita. We’ve been married for 23 years
now and are still going strong.
MR. GROSSMAN: How did your career with the FWS affect your family?
MR. ESTRADA: It prospered! We had a paycheck coming home. I started out in the
FWS in the fall of 1972. I started out at $7.36 an hour. That’s all they’re making down
in Tennessee right now! For anybody that’s been working for a while. Minimum wage is
five something isn’t it?
MR. GROSSMAN: Umhum. So how did you meet Juanita?
MR. ESTRADA: Through a mutual friend. They introduced us.
MR. GROSSMAN: What year did you guys marry?
MR. ESTRADA: In 1978.
MR. GROSSMAN: Did you and Juanita have any children?
MR. ESTRADA: No. Juanita has three children, that’s Michael, Anita and Chris.
Michael still lives in Juneau, Anita lives in Lawrenceville, GA and Chris is in Boca Raton,
FL. My daughter Tina lives here. Rocky lives out at Angoon. And Yvonne is down in
Mount Vernon, Washington.
MR. GROSSMAN: They are sort of scattered about.
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t know how many grandkids I’ve got. I think there’s twelve
grandkids, and I have five great-grandkids.
MR. GROSSMAN: Wow! So back to your career with the Service Ted. Why did you
want to work for FWS at the time?
MR. ESTRADA: It became a coincidence more that anything because they were moving
the Marine Science Center of the University of Alaska to Seward. My family was
established here with a house and everything. That was in 1972. I knew Fred Robards
and Sid Morgan. I tried to get on the Surf Bird when they had it. It was between…
Johnson was quitting.
MR. GROSSMAN: Johnson was…
MR. ESTRADA: Johnson was the original Skipper on the Surf Bird. Then they were
looking because he retired.
MR. GROSSMAN: What was his first name Ted?
MR. ESTRADA: I can’t remember.
MR. GROSSMAN: OK, Mr. Johnson. That doesn’t matter.
MR. ESTRADA: There was a Fred Halstead, but he wasn’t on that boat. They were
looking for a Skipper for the Surf Bird and I put an application in. Fred Robards wanted
a tree climber, so they hired a tree climber instead of a boat Skipper. Fred kind of ran the
boat. But anyway, as that went on, I was working at Northern Commercial at the time,
no I wasn’t. I was still at the University. That was during the transfer period. I had
took the boat up to Valdez and I was just kind of working back and forth. Then Fred
Robards called and asked me if I wanted to Skipper the boat. They were getting another
boat similar to the Surf Bird. But it was up in Kodiak. With everything happening right
then I said, “Yes”. I didn’t even ask “How much?” That’s how I got hired with the FWS
at the time. That was in November of 1972. Wayne Nyugen [Spelling?] was the Field
Supervisor for southeast Alaska. He was based in Juneau. Marlene Sorello was the
Secretary. She was an old friend. She was born as Marlene Palmer. I have known her
since I was a kid. She was the Secretary. When I walked into the office, Don
Montgomery was basically my… he was the Chief Biologist, right under Wayne. Bruce
Konnet was there. Ron Byrd was there. I was the next person. I remember Wayne’s
instructions to me. He said, “When you’re out doing some stuff and someone asks ‘what
are they going to say?’ You’d better answer because you are part of ‘they’”.
MR. GROSSMAN: So your first position then, from the very start was… what did they
call that position?
MR. ESTRADA: The name there, you really had a big title. You were Master Engineer.
You were the Skipper and the Master. I guess I got too high powered for somebody
because now they are called Ship Operators.
MR. GROSSMAN: At least it gives you a clue that it’s a boat. So basically, your job
was to take this boat and maintain it.
MR. ESTRADA: And get it ready. You want to go back to the beginning of the boat, of
what I’d seen before we got into it?
MR. GROSSMAN: Absolutely.
MR. ESTRADA: The Curlew was an Army P-Boat, the P446. They were built in 1953.
They were built for the Korean War. Their design was a harbor tug, cargo and passengers.
I don’t know where they were built or how many.
MR. GROSSMAN: But they were built in California right?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, somewhere in California.
MR. GROSSMAN: San Diego, I think is it.
MR. ESTRADA: Some were built there. And some were built back up on the
Mississippi River I think somewhere. St. Louis or something like that. Anyway the
Bureau of Mines had this boat and I think they got it out of the Cosmolean. [?] Because
it was still when the Bureau of Mines got it. They wanted to do seismic work out in San
Francisco Bay. But the boats configuration was that it had a cargo hold. And forward of
the cargo hold was the crew’s quarters. This was four beds, oil stove, shower and toilet.
I don’t remember the exact configuration of it. Then, there was the cargo hold. They you
moved back to the engineering area on the top deck. There was the wheelhouse. At the
very back was where the bus seats were. It was designed for twenty-one seats for
moving people. That was the original configuration. The Bureau of Mines took the cargo
hold and cut a hatchway between the crew’s quarters and the cargo hold. I guess
originally you had to go outside from wheelhouse to go down to the crew’s quarters and
crawl down through a companionway. So they cut a hatchway through between the two
and they put chain-hung bunks to sleep on in the cargo hold. In there they kind of
extended the galley into there; there was a refrigerator and freezer and stuff. And they cut
another companionway at the other end of the crew’s quarters to go up into the
wheelhouse. That’s where those steps are in there today. The Bureau of Mines did that.
They did a lot of modifications. They took all of the bus seats out and put a great big
worktable in the back. They took the original fourteen or sixteen-inch portholes out and
put plastic ones in, so they cut holes in it so they could run their seismic gear out the
back window without having to hang it out an open window. But their problem with it
was that it was an unstable platform. Everybody was getting seasick. Water was always
coming over on the deck so they had to wear boots all of the time.
MR. GROSSMAN: Was this when it was stationed in…
MR. ESTRADA: It was in Tiburon. I guess that’s near San Francisco somewhere. I
don’t know how many years they used it, but they declared it an unstable platform.
They just couldn’t do anything with it and people were always getting sick out in the
Bay. Those P Boats roll something good when you get them broadside.
MR. GROSSMAN: They kind of have a round bottom.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, they are round and shiny. They had a good engine I’ll say that
for them. But anyway, they justified why they couldn’t use it because it wasn’t any
good as an unstable platform. The National Marine Fisheries justified why they needed a
boat just like that to use up in Kodiak. So they somehow how got the boat with their
justification that they needed a good stable boat, whatever it was. They took off and
brought the boat to Seattle. It rolled so bad that they took it in the yard there and put on
rolling shocks. They are kind of like fins that fit down under the boat in the water to
drag. They were fifteen inches wide and thirty feet long. They were supposed to drag
through the water to keep the boat from rolling. It helped a little bit, but their engineer
wasn’t that bright. The boat only drew four feet of water in the front, and eight feet in
the back. So when they were sitting in dry dock, of course, they put them on parallel to
the boat. Then they put the boat in the water and so they were about two and a half or
three feet higher in the front than they were in the back. It did help the boat from rolling
but it slowed it down. There was a lot of drag on it. They took it up to Kodiak, and
everybody got sick on it. They used it in Prince William Sound. They used it on two or
three trips. And they decided that it was an unstable platform. So they tied it up in
Kodiak and didn’t use it for about two years. They just couldn’t use it because at Kodiak
there is open Ocean. The original design was harbor tug, passengers and cargo. Harbor
tug means it’s for inland waters in the harbor. The Fish and Wildlife Service wrote up the
description to show that they needed that boat for their work, they justified that that
would be the boat we would want to have. This was after National Marine Fisheries de-justified
it.
MR. GROSSMAN: What was it called when it was stationed in Kodiak?
MR. ESTRADA: The Cripple Creek. The Bureau of Mines named it after Cripple
Creek, a mine that was down in northern California or Nevada. That named sounded like
it was a disease. That’s why it was renamed.
MR. GROSSMAN: How did you folks come up with the name?
MR. ESTRADA: Fish and Wildlife Service’s headquarters were in Portland at the time.
Alaska wasn’t a region. It was run out of Portland. I don’t know why, who or what
decided to rename the boat. But three names were picked. I had Goldeneye picked. And
somebody else had picked the Peregrine Falcon and the Curlew. I don’t know who
picked all of those names, but anyway, the name was chosen in Portland. They named it
for the endangered Eskimo Curlew. I think it was endangered at the time, or still is?
MR. GROSSMAN: It is considered extinct now.
MR. ESTRADA: That’s what the Curlew was named from, the Eskimo Curlew. They
did shorten the ‘Eskimo’ off of it. And I am glad it was named the Curlew instead of the
Goldeneye for some reason.
MR. GROSSMAN: Goldeneye would have been a good name also. So did they just ask
people to submit names?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’ t think there was anybody who was particularly asked. They
may have asked Robards since it was up in his area, or Wayne, or whatever it was. Or
maybe it was somebody in Portland. It wasn’t a contest or anything. It was pretty much
given. Nobody asked any opinions, they just told you what it was going to be.
MR. GROSSMAN: So then, the FWS justified getting it, and the timing was great for
you?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, they asked if I wanted to be Skipper. But I knew what it could
look like. I knew the Surf Birds. Surf Birds came out of Cosmolean when, I don’t know
what you’d want to call it. It was still new. It was still on a barge. Fred Robards and Sid
Morgan pretty much designed the way it was going to be; the crew’s quarters and the
galley and stuff. So I knew what the Cripple Creek was going to be like. I had a vision of
it. But was I disappointed. I almost quit when I got there. That’s when I found out it
was covered up in ice. It was tied up at the dock for a year and a half or two years. And
pardon the expression, but there was not “____” watched or supervised, the boat wasn’t.
The Hippies had moved aboard. They didn’t have anywhere to live, they’d do down
there. I don’t know how they got out on the base, but they did. I got on the boat and
took a look at it. There was wired running all over the place, just kind of plugged in to
some electric heaters. The bathrooms quit working. And after they did that they just
defecated in any corner they wanted to all over the boat. It had the old swinging chain
bunks up forward. I almost walked off.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was a pretty bad condition.
MR. ESTRADA: It was really bad. I mean, it was gaggy. I went to start the generators,
they wouldn’t run. I had to take one generator completely out and put another one in. I
am trying to remember but the DC generator didn’t run. The boats were all 101 direct
current. The engine didn’t run or the generator didn’t gen, I forget exactly. But anyway
we took the AC generator, which used to originally be the water pump for firefighting.
Somebody had taken those engines out. We took the engine out and replaced it with a
spare that was up there.
MR. GROSSMAN: That was the generator engine?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. We got it running and used it to keep the batteries charged up to
keep the all of the light and everything going. I spend about six weeks just scrapping out
the boat; cleaning it, washing it, hosing it down and redoing generators.
MR. GROSSMAN: And you got the main engine going too?
MR. ESTRADA: We got the main engine going. All of the heating system was all froze
out. All of the plugs were froze out. All of the radiator pipes were frozen and busted.
We eliminated those and used electric heaters just to keep the boat heated. I don’t
remember if the furnace ran or not. I didn’t run the furnace because the water piping and
everything was broken on it.
MR. GROSSMAN: Was your new boss then pretty good about providing you with the
support and funds that you needed?
MR. ESTRADA: They had the funding for it for the first year to do the modification on
it. But I guess, like I said, I knew what it could look like. It was a tough go.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you ended up sticking it out, and ?
MR. ESTRADA: We got her running and put he up on the ways. We scrubbed the
bottom. Bruce Connen, being an airplane pilot was qualified to navigate. Then he had
another airplane pilot up in Fairbanks. I don’t remember his name. He was also a pilot
so he could navigate. Then, there was George Putney and myself. So there was the four
of us and we decided to bring the boat down to Juneau. Of course, Bruce got sick right
off of the bat. The other guy got sick right off of the bat. But they stood their watches
and we did bring the boat to Juneau. Then we tore it apart. We went in there with
cutting torches and cut everything out of the crew’s quarters. We took all of the stuff out
that was done where we sleep today. We took it out and put in plywood walls and
insulation. We made it so that it is pretty much the way it is today; six beds down in
there. We cut out the galley out forward and made it into a sort of locker. They were
going to do diving so we kind of used if for a dive locker, which it still is.
MR. GROSSMAN: You set it up with an air compressor and tanks?
MR. ESTRADA: We didn’t have an air compressor at the time. We had one that was
portable sitting up on the deck.
MR. GROSSMAN: I see.
MR. ESTRADA: And then we went into what is todays galley where all the bus seats
used to be. We cut everything out of that, part of the wall we cut out. We moved it
forward towards the one going to the engine room. Then we lined the whole area in there
and put in the settee and the kitchen sink and stoves. It’s a galley not a kitchen sink! I
am forgetting where I am. We did all of that between December and May, which was my
first trip out.
MR. GROSSMAN: So it five months time, or less, four months I guess. You
completely retrofitted the whole boat.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, we retrofitted the whole boat. And we had two electric
generator motors, one AC and one DC to make electricity. I remember getting the DC one
fixed. We didn’t have any AC on the boat. We got rid of all of the AC [electric current].
We bought a DC refrigerator/freezer. The stove was an oil fired stove. The lights were
just DC.
MR. GROSSMAN: Now, a lot of it has been converted back to AC.
MR. ESTRADA: Well they never were AC to start with.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I see.
MR. ESTRADA: A lot of it was just wires hanging all over. The furnaces and
everything were Waywolf [spelling?] Furnaces. And they had basically a motor to run
the igniter and everything. But they had and AC/DC motor, and the DC ran the motor
but they had AC slip rings to create AC to fire the transformer. The transformer was for
the igniters. They wouldn’t work on DC so they needed AC. And Leland made that
motor and they just quit making it.
MR. GROSSMAN: That made it pretty tough to maintain something like that.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah.
MR. GROSSMAN: But over time you just continued to make little improvements and
help bring it up to what it is today. Which is, I guess, in most people’s opinion a pretty
great work platform for the inside waters.
MR. ESTRADA: That’s exactly what it was for. And it worked great on the inside
waters. Then back in about 1989 during the oil spill, somebody decided to take the boat
up to Cordova, or Prince William Sound. That was a wild ride!
MR. GROSSMAN: Was that because of the Exxon Valdez oil spill?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. Prior to that, remember I told they put those rolling chaugs [?]
on the boat?
MR. GROSSMAN: Right.
MR. ESTRADA: I looked at them and evaluated them. One time we had the boat in the
yard. I had them cut those rolling chaugs off. I know they had left them. There was
three-inch angle iron that was welded to the hull. I had them cut the rest of the twelve
inches off. So right now, they are only three inches. In running the boat, it gets the same
RPM. It picked up almost two knots of speed. That’s how badly they were put on.
And the boat didn’t roll any more or any less after we cut them off.
MR. GROSSMAN: Did you put the stabilizer polls on then to help?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, we went up to Prince William Sound that first year for the oil
spill and before I came back, I decided to put these stabilizer polls on it. That made an
altogether different boat out of it. But those, following sea, those T Boats just do not
steer. They get up, and the back end wants to swap around on us. And you had to fight
that steering wheel all of the time. So by putting the stabilizer polls on, or a pair on
mains, if you want to call that; they are twenty-five feet long so there is a fifty-foot
spread on them. There were thirty-two inch parimanes. You could get in a following sea
and the parimanes would seem to hold the boat steady. It took all of the roll; not all of
the roll, it took ninety percent of the roll out. Instead of rolling over on a wave, it just
kind of went down with the wave. It rides a lot better. But it’s still not designed for
ocean.
MR. GROSSMAN: It’s still better on the inside waters? But when it kicks up on the
inside a little bit that makes it a little more comfortable?
MR. ESTRADA: Oh yeah! It makes it easy to steer, and it makes it more comfortable.
MR. GROSSMAN: Well Ted, I want to shift gears a little bit on you. I know that you
worked with lots and lots of different folks. Can you describe some of the major projects
or issues that you were involved in providing support for over the years?
MR. ESTRADA: Well, the major thing for the boat was to do evaluations of the
estuaries. As far as permits are going, our first couple of years we went out to a lot of the
different bays, which were proposed as log transfer facilities. So we went out and did
complete inventories of these bays. We set pots, and gill nets and we did the fishery in
the bay. We did low tide beach surveys, just walked along the edge of the beach and made
pictures of the outcroppings, the rocks and the stuff that was in there. We’d go into a
bay and spend ten days to two weeks just to do an evaluation. That’s what the original
intent of it was. Then, it’s kind of gradually escaped that and it went specific. They’re
gonna put a dumpsite on such and such a point, or up at a creek and it eventually went
specific to that. We’d go into a Bay and explore that area and make recommendations on
whether or not to have the project go or not go. It’s always been a diving platform since I
was on the boat. There’s a few other things that we have done. We did a lot of bird
survey work off of it, and eagle work. But it’s original intent was to do the estuary
studies.
MR. GROSSMAN: So that was the Ecological Services Division?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah.
MR. GROSSMAN: And the eagle work would have been Raptor Management, which is
under Migratory Birds.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and we just incorporated that when we were doing a Bay.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, I see.
MR ESTRADA: When we were doing a bay evaluation we’d go and look for the eagle
nests and stuff that were in the bay.
MR. GROSSMAN: Oh, so you are locating the eagle nests and marking them while you
were in there for other projects?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, and we’d give the information to the eagle management people.
MR. GROSSMAN: And you were part of the trans-location work when they were
moving eagles to down south?
MR. ESTRADA: They moved them to Tennessee.
MR. GROSSMAN: Tennessee, where you now live.
MR. ESTRADA: They did several different trans-locations. But the one in particular;
I’ve been on three different ones, but the one particular that I remember, I think it was
1991 or 1992. We took some people from Crossville, TN out, and they took twenty-four
baby eagles and they flew them down to Tennessee and put them in hacking towers.
Today, a friend of mine who lives down there says that those eagles we took down there
are producing young that have all made it up. So they are all doing well.
MR. GROSSMAN: Did you do anything with marine mammals like sea lions, seals, or
otters or anything along those lines?
MR. ESTRADA: I think we were involved with a trade off with the goat out of
Ketchikan. I think the State was doing it, but I forget why we were there. It was
Mountain Goat stuff. They were transferred down to Oregon in the Shasta Mountains or
somewhere. I don’t know what happened. They said that one of them was still headed
for Mexico! I guess he was looking for a warmer climate. I think we were involved with
that. We did a lot of Sea Otter surveys. I guess they were doing a lot of Sea Otter counts
after they were transferred in 1960 something. It was the time that they did the atomic
exploration out on Shimia. They buried a bunch of stuff and were trying to simulate an
earthquake or something. They shipped a bunch of Sea Otter out bound for southeast
Alaska out of Cape Spencer, Surge Bay on Yakobe Island. They were dropped at White
Sisters, and down at Neccer Island. [Place name spelling?] I am just trying to remember
all of the places that they went to. They went farther south into the Prince of Wales
group so we went back and did Sea Otter counts.
MR. GROSSMAN: So, the ones that were wiped out by during Russian fur trade were
reintroduced from the Aleutians and then you guys were doing follow up to see how
many and where they had spread to? Today they are still expanding!
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. And there is plenty of them. I don’t know if the State is taking
care of that or it is still a Federal charge.
MR. GROSSMAN: Yeah, it’s still a Federal job. Were there any of the projects that
you enjoyed the most?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, I really like the Sea Otters surveys. I just really enjoyed getting
out and seeing them and counting them. The estuary work, well…
MR. GROSSMAN: Did it get kind of boring for you?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, it’s kind of like skiff tending.
MR. GROSSMAN: Basically you’d just hole up somewhere and sit and wait on these
guys, and that wasn’t too interesting. It sounds like you liked the part of moving around
and doing things?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, where I could be part of it. Like, I think it was in 1995 when
you were up on the islands.
MR. GROSSMAN: I spent time in the Aleutians.
MR. ESTRADA: I was up in the Barren Islands out of Homer, just east of Kodiak.
They were doing bird counts of the islands up there. Now, I enjoyed that. That was
neat. It was fun. And it was new for me up there. Although I had been out in the
Aleutians Chains and all of the way the Previlovs with other boats. I enjoyed that quite a
bit out there. Running transects, or just running the boat was a challenge. Not really a
challenge, but it was something different to do. Ed was up there sitting out in the wind
and the rain counting ducks and I was in the wheelhouse drinking coffee.
MR. GROSSMAN: There are some perks with your job! Was there any particular high
point in your career Ted? You were with the Service for over twenty years.
MR. ESTRADA: I was with the Service for twenty-five years.
MR. GROSSMAN: When was it that you retired?
MR. ESTRADA: That was January 3, 1997.
MR. GROSSMAN: In 1997, so in twenty-five years, was there one particular high
point?
MR. ESTRADA: Man, you’ve got me thinking. Because you know, the whole thing
was a high point. It was a job without having to work!
MR. GROSSMAN: So it was more of a Federal vacation for you then?
MR. ESTRADA: It was all fun. I mean there was areas…. As a child, I never grew up in
west coast of Prince of Wales Island and traveling around in there, I enjoyed it. It was
new to me. There were places that were new to me. There were places that I didn’t like.
A lot of them I called ‘backwater sloughs’. I liked the coastal areas, they were always a
challenge and different for me.
MR. GROSSMAN: All of the various projects, all over, took you into new country.
Would you say that that exploring was the high point?
MR. ESTRADA: I can go into Bogadequadra [sounds like] where they put in the
Millennium mine.
MR. GROSSMAN: Quartz Hill.
MR. ESTRADA: That was new because we were doing a survey of what’s in there. We
barrowed some King Crab pots and a bunch of other stuff and set King Crab pots all up
and down the bays in there. We set Shrimp pots along the edges of the cliffs. We got
some beautiful Prawns. They were the nice big foot-long ones. Those were some of the
perks.
MR. GROSSMAN: So those were some of the side benefits; fresh seafood, and exploring
new places?
MR. ESTRADA: Bogadequadra is to some people, a pretty place. To me, it’s a
backwater slough. There was food in there.
MR. GROSSMAN: What about a low point Ted?
MR. ESTRADA: The lowest point in my life was when the reduction gear went out on
the boat and it was tied up for a year and a half. We couldn’t use the boat. We just sat
around and sat around until they got enough money. It took about a quarter million
bucks. We finally took the boat south. We got it running enough by putting shims and
used parts in the reduction gear. The engine in that boat was a 375 CAT, which is no
longer in service. The reduction gear was made by Snow and Amsted. I’d say that fifty
years ago or before, it was sold out to a Mexican outfit down in Mexico, so we didn’t
have any parts. There were no parts available for it other than what you could find out of
scrap. So, I forget what year it was that we changed the engine out in the boat. Then, life
for me picked up again.
MR. GROSSMAN: I think it was probably 1992, or around in there that you got in re-powered
that fall.
MR. ESTRADA: Then, life started to pick up again. We got the boat alive and running.
We took it down to Billingham, Washington and they cut an eight by six-foot hole right in
the side of the boat! They stripped the engine room. At that time we put in two
generators that we got free, from NOAA. The price was right on those! And we put a
new 3408 CAT in there. That was held up pretty much all winter, the project was. But
it was nice to have a new engine in there. It used more fuel! [Higher capacity]
MR. GROSSMAN: It used less fuel, and weighed considerably less.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, it weighed a whole lot less and they had to make up the weight
difference by putting lead bars in the bottom of the boat. They used two or three tons of
lead bars.
MR. GROSSMAN: Just for ballast?
MR. ESTRADA: Just to bring the boat down. It’s still not as deep as it originally was.
It’s stilling running about six inches light. Then we put new hydraulic steering in. The
old cable system, we took that out. There are hydraulic rams back on the rudder. That
was really faster than having cables running off of shives. It broke one time in the middle
of winter out in the middle of the Chatham Straits, the cable did. So we braided some
rope and put some splices in the broken cable. I don’t remember how we did it, but we
tied rope between them. We were able to make it around for the rest of the trip.
MR. GROSSMAN: If I recall Ted, basically because of your industrious nature you
never lost a day in the field because of equipment failure. You were always able to jury-rig
something.
MR. ESTRADA: I know where you are going with this!
MR. GROSSMAN: Yeah, there’s a couple of famous stories. Can you tell me about the
time you repaired the generator with a stove part?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. We bent a push rod on the onnen generator. So we were out of
electricity. We had these stainless guards on the galley stove. It was an Olympic stove, I
think. So I took one of the guards down there. They are round, and about the same
dimension. It think it’s about 5/16” round. We took a file and a hacksaw and cut them to
length and made it fit, stuck it in the generator and we finished off the day, and the rest of
the whole trip running off of that until we got new push rods for it.
MR. GROSSMAN: Are there any other major jury-rigs that you were able to
accomplish in the field like that?
MR. ESTRADA: One was an outboard. I forget there was a little spring in there on the
starter. We couldn’t get this electric started working and we couldn’t crank it by hand.
So I was looking for a spring that fell overboard or something, or broke or what. I was
looking around and finally took one out of the base of a flashlight. I got that placed in the
starter and it worked for the rest of the trip didn’t it?
MR. GROSSMAN: That’s right, I remember that!
MR. ESTRADA: There was just a lot of little things.
MR. GROSSMAN: You always seemed to have a part or a tool that would get you
through. In all of your time out, was there a particularly dangerous or frightening
experience that you had?
MR. ESTRADA: There was. In 1990, I was going back up to Prince William Sound in
March. Dan Alrey was my cook, and Don Williamson. We were supposed to have a
good weather window for going across. But just before we got to Yakutat something
happened. The weather set in. The winds were blowing sixty and seventy. We were
quite a ways off the beach. I was on my way to Yakutat. We were getting closer and
closer and there was a southeaster on my tail. Those seas got up to twenty-four to thirty
feet. Three of us were in the wheelhouse with our survival suits on, tied around our
waists. We got out there, and just kept heading for Yakutat. It was a tug in the bay and
he talked to me every ten minutes. He came out in the bay. He had dropped his barge.
He came out in the bay and stood by the buoy talking to me every ten minutes until I got
in to the bay. I was scared. I remember one wave breaking and crashing down on the
back deck. The windows on the Curlew are twenty-four by thirty glass windows. So
when you have a wave crash down, I thought we were going to have broken windows.
That was probably one of my worst fears that I ever had with the boat. Other than the
time when I had let it go dry once. We were anchored at place called Beyond Grief Island
[sounds like] beyond Duncan Canal. There was a donut hole out there. There was just
enough room for one boat to anchor, and you’ve got to anchor in the middle of it. I went
around and found the hole. But it was an extreme low tide the next morning. As the tide
went out, my anchor line got longer. I ended up with the back of the boat sitting up on
the side of the bank. The stern was dry and the bow was still afloat. I didn’t fear loosing
it.
MR. GROSSMAN: It was embarrassing, particular when it ends up on a photo.
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. When somebody takes a picture of it.
MR. GROSSMAN: But there was no harm done. What about, I know that you were
always very light-hearted about your trips. Was there one particular, or several
humorous experiences that you can remember which really stood out? I guess it’s hard to
narrow it down.
MR. ESTRADA: I can’t think of anything that was really humorous that I’d want to
talk about. [On tape]
MR. GROSSMAN: I see, OK. [Laughing]
MR. ESTRADA: I did find places in the west coast of Prince of Wales where there were
uncharted rocks. I found a lot of them. I marked a lot of them on different charts that I
had on the boat. I marked where they were. Everybody says, “No it’s not there, it’s
here”. I had a friend who was on the Sundance, another one of the Fish and Game boats;
they also found it. They couldn’t have been dangerous because they were over twelve
feet.
MR. GROSSMAN: So the bottom line is that the charts are pretty good but they are not
perfect?
MR. ESTRADA: They are not perfect, no.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you, being someone that’s familiar with the terrain…
MR. ESTRADA: You’ve got to think about it. There’s places on the west coast of
Chicagof Island where are rock where they are not supposed to be. A lot of them I
marked. I think a lot of them are back on the charts again, that I located; not
purposefully, but…
MR. GROSSMAN: Over that time, Ted, you’ve seen an awful lot of changes in the
FWS. Can you comment on that?
MR. ESTRADA: Personnel, I’ve seen change. Originally, in the Juneau Field Office, the
only one left is Jack Hodges who was on the boat in the first year I think, and Bruce
Connen and Jake. The other ones are in the southeast. I don’t know what’s up north. I
have seen a lot of the Regional Directors change. I don’t even remember them. There was
Gordy Watson, and Shriner, and Butz. Who was the one when you were here?
MR. GROSSMAN: It think it was Stillwell, oh, or Walt Stigletts, and now Dave Allen.
So, personnel has turned over a lot?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah, personnel has changed a lot.
MR. GROSSMAN: How about programs?
MR. ESTRADA: I don’t know where the program is. The original concept of it is
basically still here. That’s Ecological Service protecting the estuaries, as far as putting in
log transfer facilities, which I don’t think they are doing much of. Dock and Harbors, and
Compliance are still there. We did a lot of Compliance work.
MR. GROSSMAN: I know that incidental to various missions you performed at least a
couple of rescues of other boaters didn’t you?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. The first one was done out of Craig. There was a May Day and
we went bombing out the bay. We were already moving when this happened. There was
a boat going dry up on the rocks and the waves were crashing on it. I got as close as I
could, and I sent somebody; I can’t remember who was with me, on a thirteen foot
Boston Whaler to get it close to get them off. It was fairly rough. And it was kind of
humorous because the first thing that came off was two rolls of “snoos”.
MR. GROSSMAN: You don’t want to get that wet.
MR. ESTRADA: The next thing that came off was a couple of chain saws. I don’t know
how much beer they had had, but it was quite a bit. We got them off and took them back
to the Craig. They just left the boat there. It busted up. In fact, it busted up before we
left. Another one was a more serious one. It was about fourteen miles north of Sitka. I
don’t remember exactly, what happened, but after talking to the people I kind of put
things together on this one. Their boat caught fire in the evening. It was a pleasure
cruiser. There was a propane explosion in the galley. The boat burned to the water line
and the people said that there were at least eight boats that went by them and never
bothered to stop. There was black smoke rolling from the fiberglass burning, and
everything else. They made it to the beach. They got severely burned. I was coming
back from the outside coast and I see this black smoke at seven o’clock in the morning or
something like that. What they did was they one of the fender tires or something from
the boat was afloat and still burning. It had floated ashore. They got a fire going with
that. We went in there and pulled them off. We called the Coast Guard but they couldn’t
get out. There was two firefighters, or two troopers out fishing and they had lot faster
boat that I had. We took them on the boat and got them stabilized. We got some warm
tea into them. They were badly burned. I forget exactly what was done on board. They
put them in that fast skiff and they had them in the hospital in Sitka in twenty minutes.
There was a letter written that I still have at home, that was written about it in the Sitka
Sentinel. There was another boat over in Wrangell that had broke down. It was a small
twenty-four footer. All of his wiring was bad. We picked the guy up and were going to
take him in to Wrangell. Instead, we took him into Shoemaker Cove. No, I took him in to
Wrangell. He wanted to go in to Shoemaker Cove because Wrangell was closer. But he
didn’t want to. We got him in there, and come to find out, he had a bunch of dope and
stuff on the boat. That’s why he didn’t want to go to Wrangell. He was wanted. He got
picked up there!
MR. GROSSMAN: So that was more of a Police mission then.
MR. ESTRADA: Well, yeah. He was out drifting, so….
MR. GROSSMAN: Well, that’s pretty much most of the questions that I had Ted,
which was an awful lot. Did you ever fill in any of the other Service boats like the Surf
Bird or the Aleutian Tern?
MR. ESTRADA: I made two or three trips across the gulf on the Aleutian Tern, when
they were bringing the boat back and forth with a Skipper on it. I had taken the Surf Bird
out on a couple of trips. We didn’t mention anything about how the Curlew was used for
two years in a row in Prince William Sound during the oil spill. In fact, the Curlew was
the first government boat on the scene other than the Coast Guard.
MR. GROSSMAN: Wow! And that’s several day steaming to get there isn’t it?
MR. ESTRADA: It’s seventy-two hours from the time that it happened.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you just basically heard the news and took off. Whoever it was
told us to, “Git!”. [Go there fast]. So we just grabbed a bunch of groceries and away we
went. The first mission of course was “what are we going to do when we get there?” So
we ended up picking up dead animals and dead birds. There were a lot of boats out
picking up off of the beaches. I don’t recall whether we got live ones or dead ones. I
think we picking up dead ones and bringing them in.
MR. GROSSMAN: Was that to keep the scavengers from getting on them?
MR. ESTRADA: Yeah. The first year we did that. The second year, they were doing a
bird study. It think it was Migratory Birds that used the Curlew up there. They were
doing a lot of simulation work. I don’t want to say this but I consider it a real waste of
hard earned money.
MR. GROSSMAN: Is there anything else that you can think of that might help in the
understanding the history or the involvement of these boats?
MR. ESTRADA: I could say that those Army T-boats, built in 1953 were designed for
harbor and not the ocean. They were good for what they were intended for.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you would say that they are an excellent work platform in inside
waters?
MR. ESTRADA: In inside waters. The Park Service has one called the Nunitank. Fish
and Wildlife has the Surf Bird. Fish and Game has the Polaris, which was originally the
Aleutian Tern; the one Putney was running. Dale Hanson was one down in Ketchikan.
He uses it for rough salvage.
MR. GROSSMAN: Is that the Alaskan Salvor?
MR. ESTRADA: He has a decompression chamber on there.
MR. GROSSMAN: There’s the Enforcer.
MR. ESTRADA: The State Troopers have The Enforcer.
MR. GROSSMAN: I know that there’s a private one called The Hobbitt.
MR. ESTRADA: My buddy has The Hobbitt. And he has made a yacht out of it.
There’s another one called the Mary Ann down in Seattle. He cut the cabin off and
moved it ahead fifteen feet. He had a big afterdeck and he Tuna fishes with it. There’s
another one that they use for Tuna fishing that is altogether rigged different. So they’ve
have used them a lot. I think down in Florida, where it be Florida State, or Fish and
Wildlife, there is some agency uses one as a research boat. They have them on the Great
Lakes. Those are used for research. I don’t know how many of them were built. I like
them. They were built out of cored tin steel for the Korean War. And the reason us
because cored tin is ten percent stainless. That made the middle tougher and basically
bullet proof. With the war at that time, it wasn’t necessarily bullet proof, but it helped.
It made is rubbery. It was like shooting at rubber, I guess. The stainless being soft, it
was more flexible.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you’ve gone through a few drill bits in your day, trying to drill
through for various purposes?
MR. ESTRADA: Yes, lots of drill bits! The other thing that changed on there; I went to
a four bladed propeller, rather than the three. It got rid of a lot of vibration. There’s been
a lot of changes it went through, but it’s still a T-boat.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you’ve improved it greatly but it still needs to be…
MR. ESTRADA: It needs to be used for what it was intended for.
MR. GROSSMAN: You retired in when?
MR. ESTRADA: January 3, 1997. I moved and lived in Washington State for about six
months. Then I picked up and moved to Cleveland, Tennessee. It is thirty miles north of
Chattanooga. I love it there. I still have my license to run boats but I also have a Bus
Driver’s license now. I am driving a School Bus.
MR. GROSSMAN: So you can navigate on land and water!
MR. ESTRADA: Right!
MR. GROSSMAN: Well, I want to thank you Ted. This is really wonderful. Certainly
no one knows the Curlew more than you.
MR. ESTRADA: Well, I think Joe knows the Curlew pretty well. I still get calls from
Joe.
MR. GROSSMAN: We’ll certainly interview him too. I sure appreciate this, and get
you copies of the transcript. If you think of anything else in the meantime… I do greatly
appreciate the pictures. We’ll make some copies and exchange a few. Thank you.
END
Transcribed by;
Sarah Cargill
4909 General Anderson Court
Sharpsburg, MD 21782
301 432 7703
Vagirl@peoplepc.com